Jon Talton - Dry Heat

“It’s a new scenario,” he said grimly. “The female officer may be missing. Those witnesses remember a woman who went out to the street with the men. Nobody’s seen her since the shots were fired.”

“We need to talk.”

Peralta turned to face us. We were sitting in the backseat of Chief Deputy Kimbrough’s ford Expedition. Kimbrough was driving and Peralta was talking. It was a lot of departmental brass to be shoved into one SUV.

Peralta said again, “We need to talk. Lindsey, did you hear of any threats, anything at all?”

“No,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“Around,” Peralta said.

“He doesn’t want to have to deal with Scottsdale PD and the feds,” Kimbrough said, gently grinning, making a half turn to look at us. The chief deputy was wearing a khaki summer suit already, a bad omen for a gentle spring. But, as usual, he carried it off beautifully. The suit was set off with a starched white shirt and abstract pattern blue bow tie that somehow all complemented the rich dark chocolate color of his skin. We were driving north on Scottsdale Road doing the speed limit. Cars and trucks howled impatiently past us.

“I don’t want to be screwing around in public if somebody’s trying to kill Lindsey,” Peralta said. “Better to be mobile.”

“You think that’s what this is?” I asked, a worry pain stabbing me at the bottom of my breastbone.

“How the hell would I know, Mapstone? It’s a damned strange coincidence if this wasn’t a hit. We shut down the Russian mob’s big profit engine. So they retaliate. Why else would somebody take out two feds, working for two separate agencies?”

“And,” Kimbrough said, “do it with that kind of firepower. I thought we won the Cold War? How the hell did the Russian mafia get to Phoenix?”

“It’s a global economy,’ I said. “More people on the move around the world than anytime in history. It’s all because we won the Cold War.”

“Thank you, professor,” Peralta grumbled. “But you’d think these Reds would stand out like a sore thumb here. I can even spot the people who just rolled in from Iowa.”

“You guys should get out more,” I said. “I hear Russian spoken by customers at Safeway.”

“That’s ’cause you live in the ’hood,” Kimbrough said, grinning broadly. “I’m sorry, the historic districts.”

“You’re just jealous,” Lindsey said.

To break the tension, I decided to needle Peralta a little. “To continue the lesson,” I said. He let out a groan. “There are some school districts in Phoenix where more than one hundred languages are spoken.”

“I can’t even get most deputies to learn Espanol,” Peralta sighed.

“And,” I added, “the Russians have been in the Salt River Valley a long time. I think the first big group came around 1911, to work in the sugar beet fields in Glendale.”

“What about Rachel?” Lindsey said, drumming her long, slender fingers on the tops of her thighs. Kimbrough said officers had checked Rachel’s apartment in Chandler, called her mother in Prescott, tracked down her boyfriend, who was on a business trip to Las Vegas. Scottsdale PD had done a search on foot over a ten-square-block area around the Martini Ranch. Nobody knew where she was.

“They’ve got her…” Lindsey said, her voice flat.

Peralta faced front and everyone fell into silence. Resorts and restaurants flashed past, the pleasure provinces of movie stars, corporate titans and the anonymous extremely wealthy. The lights of mountainside mansions twinkled at us from a safe distance. The police radio kept up a steady conversation about mayhem around the county. I half listened to it, and remembered the only time I met Rachel Pearson.

It was an after-work party at Portland’s restaurant, and Lindsey brought some of her colleagues from the Sheriff’s Office Cybercrimes Bureau. One was a young woman with a pleasant smile, golden brown hair, and a long hippie-retro dress. Rachel talked about her favorite restaurants in Cincinnati, where her family lived and she was raised. I would have imagined her as a schoolteacher or social worker, not a cop. Rachel said Phoenix had no soul.

Like Lindsey, Rachel was a sworn deputy who specialized in computer crime-in Rachel’s case, she had an aptitude for spotting the security weaknesses of large, corporate and governmental computer systems. So if Yuri’s mobsters had kidnapped her, they had a valuable asset. Here was a woman who could tell them how the task force had defeated their credit card scheme. She could tell them how the joint task force worked, maybe allow them into law enforcement computer systems. I didn’t imagine they would ask her politely. And that was only the start of the horrors one could imagine. Car lights flashed across the dark streets. She was out there somewhere. And we were blind and powerless to help her.

“We should have anticipated this,” Peralta said. He swung sideways in his seat, facing Kimbrough and then turning his big head in our direction to make the point. “I’ve talked to the FBI and other agencies. There were thirty members of the task force around the country, including the four in Phoenix. The others are safe. We’re going to arrange for protective custody.’

I looked at Lindsey. She said, “I don’t look good in pink jail jumpsuits, Sheriff.”

He didn’t smile.

“We have safe houses,” Kimbrough said. “We’re arranging for one now.”

Something on the back of my neck tightened. “Slow down,” I said. “We can’t just go into hiding. You”-I nodded toward Peralta-“never ran away from anybody who threatened you.”

“This is different,” Peralta said, staring out at the traffic, shaking his head slowly. His eyes looked like polished black stones. “Can you remember the last time a cop was kidnapped? Kidnapped! Christ! And she’s more a technician than a cop, just sitting in front of a computer screen. No offense, Lindsey. I know you’ve been a real deputy…”

Lindsey faced away, her dark pin-straight hair brushing her collar.

“Bad guys don’t play by the rules,” Peralta said, his deep voice seeming to make the windows hum with a tuning fork echo. “But when the bad guys start snatching cops out of public places, we’ve got a new ballgame. The old Sicilian Mafia wouldn’t have dared kidnap a cop. Even that dirtball Bobby Hamid wouldn’t do this…”

As Peralta spoke, I watched the upscale shopping strips and the gated housing developments slide by the window, all seeming so look-alike safe. But one of the September 11 thhijackers had lived briefly in Scottsdale. It was a good place for people with money who wanted to be left alone, who didn’t want to know their neighbors or to be known. Hell, Yuri could be right behind that ornate faux-Spanish gate.

Peralta continued, “These Russians are on the offensive. They don’t follow any of the old rules. We can’t take the chance of Lindsey getting killed. Or captured. Everybody who worked on the task force is being moved to safety right now.”

“You guys can’t go home,” Kimbrough said. “Not even for a change of clothes.”

“How long?” Lindsey asked.

“Two weeks, maybe longer,” Kimbrough said. “Depends on how quickly we can find Yuri and take him out.”

“I have an old cat,” she said. Her voice seemed suddenly tired. “He can’t be left alone.”

“We’ll send deputies for him,” Kimbrough said.

“My garden,” she said quietly.

“Where is this safe house?” I asked.

“We have several,” Kimbrough said.

“Do the taxpayers of Maricopa County know this?”

He just smiled.

“One is up on the highway north of Wickenburg,” Peralta said. “We’ve stashed a few witnesses there before. But it’s too far away from the cavalry if there’s trouble. I have someplace else in mind.”